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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29365287">Boba and Ailyn</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/w_k_smith/pseuds/w_k_smith'>w_k_smith</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Graphic violence occurs offscreen, The Mandalorian (TV) Season 2 Spoilers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:55:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,046</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29365287</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/w_k_smith/pseuds/w_k_smith</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After Boba Fett becomes the ruler of the criminal underground of Tatooine, his daughter, Ailyn Vel, appears unannounced and uninvited. She refuses to leave, but also gives no sign of exactly why she has arrived.</p><p>(Note: Ailyn Vel is a Legends character, but I've reworked her backstory for the new timeline. No knowledge of Legends is needed to understand this story.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Boba Fett &amp; Ailyn Vel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Boba and Ailyn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Ailyn Vel appears out of nowhere. Boba doesn’t even hear rumors that she’s in the system, much less on Tatooine, before she shows up in the throne room of the palace. Boba has no idea how Ailyn managed to enter without him, Fennec, or any of the sentries catching her, but one morning she’s just there, a WESTAR-34 on each hip, scuffing her boots on the trapdoor.</p><p>Fennec draws on her immediately.</p><p>“I don’t know who you are, but your little trick is about to be more trouble than it’s worth,” Fennec says.</p><p>Ailyn raises both hands lazily. She looks different in a dozen little ways. Her hair is a few inches longer, her Mandalorian <em>birgaan</em> pack has been patched on the left shoulder strap, and there is a knotted scar on her arm that looks like an old blaster wound. But she’s still profoundly the same person, Boba can tell, from her organized weapons belt, to the permanently chipped black polish on her nails, to the stubborn smirk she has borne since she was four years old and hit the dead center of three targets in a row with Boba’s own knife.</p><p>Ailyn tilts her head toward Fennec, but looks at Boba when she says: “Bodyguard? I’m surprised, old man.”</p><p>Fennec levels her blaster inches from Ailyn’s face. “Do you have business, or just a death wish?”</p><p>“Fennec,” Boba says. “That’s my daughter.”</p><p>He isn’t sure whether to be insulted when Fennec’s immediate response is a burst of laughter. She lowers her blaster, and shakes her head. “You have a <em>kid</em>?” she says. She gives Ailyn a long look up and down. “I guess if you did raise a child this is what would result. Though I can’t see much family resemblance.”</p><p>Because apart from her brown skin, Ailyn is an echo of her mother. Tall, lean, three black lines across one eye, though Sintas’s were on her cheeks… Sintas explained the placement of Kiffar tattoos to Boba once, but he has lost that memory, and it isn’t as if Sintas can explain it to him again. When Ailyn was little, the marks were melodramatic, like Ail’ika had been playing with war paint. They suit her now.</p><p>“When your father has a few thousand identical siblings running around the galaxy, family resemblance becomes overrated,” Ailyn says, crossing her arms. She gives Boba a sharp smile. “Hi, <em>buir</em>. So you’re still alive?”</p><p>Boba hasn’t seen Ailyn in several years, though their last face-to-face meeting was on Tatooine. He was alone then, stripped of his armor by Jawas, still healing from the burns of the Sarlacc’s stomach acid and the penetrating sting of failure and indignity. Ailyn’s alarm and pity made everything worse. He pushed her away. She stormed off the planet, shouting over her shoulder that he should have had the Jawas take his stubbornness, too, because it was going to kill him one day.</p><p>“I’m Ailyn Vel,” she says to Fennec. “And you’re, what, the muscle? Clearly, neither of you two, or anybody, is in charge of making this place less of a dump.” She gestures widely. Boba doesn’t know if she means the room, the palace, or Tatooine in general.</p><p>“Has she always been like this?” Fennec asks.</p><p>“She gets it from her mother’s side,” he says, partially lying.</p><p>Ailyn taps under her eye. “Along with the face tattoos. And the dignity.”</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>And, bizarrely, Ailyn stays. She doesn’t give a reason, but camps out in the palace as if she was invited. Her little cruiser is parked somewhere safe, but other than that, her whole life is stuffed into her <em>birgaan</em>. She flits around, invisible when she wants to be. Though she seems fond of showing up anywhere at any time with no sign of how she got there, her favorite roost is a couch in a sitting area just off the throne room. It’s overstuffed, and covered in rancor hide, and probably cost as much as a good starship. Ailyn perches on it with her sand-and-dust-encrusted boots, watching holos and eating bowls of fluorescent children’s cereal.</p><p>“Do you have any jobs lined up in the system?” Boba asks her one day.</p><p>She scowls. “Can’t I just work for you? You know I’m better than any of the clowns you’ll find around here.”</p><p>Hiring good help has been surprisingly hard. Fortuna was lazy, and surrounded himself with cheap sycophants, and they let Jabba’s operation weaken and rust over. Some people think Boba is a fraud, because <em>officially</em> the real Boba Fett is as good as dead inside a Sarlacc’s gut. Others are trying to take the shift to new management as a chance to carve out their own piece of the territory. They’ll learn better.</p><p>He’s tempted to take Ailyn on. He knows she’s one of the best, because she was trained by him, after all.</p><p>“That wouldn’t look right,” he says at last. “You know that.”</p><p>She rolls her eyes like a teenager. “Of course. Force forbid that Jabba’s successor, the ice-blooded Boba Fett, commit a heinous act like nepotism. And I’m still <em>working</em>,” she says. “I shot a slaver in Mos Espa yesterday. Want to see her thumb before I ship it off as proof of kill?”</p><p>He does not.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Ailyn vanishes for a few days, though with her, it’s hard to tell. As soon as Boba has convinced himself she has left for good, he finds her emptying a few shopping bags of fresh food in the kitchen. The scene makes very little sense.</p><p>“Did you go…grocery shopping?” he asks.</p><p>“Nope.” Ailyn opens a box of cereal, and tosses a handful of dry flakes into her mouth.</p><p>“Did you steal food from one of your bounties?”</p><p>“Yes,” she says, like it’s obvious.</p><p>“And do you feel honorable about that?”</p><p>Boba has never been comfortable calling himself a full Mandalorian, and Ailyn is even less of one. Her childhood was spent on Concord Dawn, so she speaks Mando’a as well as she speaks Basic, and is more familiar with some parts of Mandalorian culture than he is. But she showed no interest in becoming fully initiated into any clan, or following the <em>Resol’nare</em>, or using <em>beskar</em>. Boba never needed to be <em>mandokarla</em> to live and work in the galaxy, but he has a code. He has boundaries. He has morals, despite what many others have accused him of. That’s what he wanted for Ailyn, more than following Mandalorian rules or galactic laws. He tried to instill that in her as much as tracking skills, or the ability to aim a blaster, or how to kill someone with one movement of a vibroblade. He just wishes he had a better idea of whether he’d succeeded.</p><p>Ailyn waves her hand. “The way I see it is this: by the time that man served his time for identity theft, all his blue milk would have spoiled anyway. I’m just preventing waste.”</p><p>That’s disappointing. He didn’t raise her to be the kind of bounty hunter who went for soft targets. “Is that who’s worthy of your skills these days? An identity thief?”</p><p>“He’s also a thief of eyes, livers, and still-beating hearts. The fraud charges are apparently all the courts could make stick. I was hired to drag him in alive, not weigh in on the criminal justice system.”</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Soon Ailyn takes it upon herself to inspect the security system. She spends a whole day in the monitor room, squinting at the computer screens and adjusting the camera angles by fractions of millimeters. It’s unnecessary. Boba has already checked the system himself. Besides, relying on electronic warnings is an amateur’s mistake. Real security is achieved by surrounding yourself with quality, loyal personnel. Which he’ll do, as soon as he can find them.</p><p>He hovers in the doorway. Her back is to him; she’s silhouetted in the light of the screens. “When do you have plans to leave this planet?” he asks. He does want her to tell him before she goes. He still doesn’t know quite why she’s here, but he doesn’t want her to slip away without his knowing.</p><p>He succeeds in annoying her. “Don’t get passive-aggressive with me,” she snaps. “I remember one time I had my back turned and you ended up in a Sarlacc pit. I thought you’d be at least 80 before I had to start looking after you. Wait – is that who Fennec is? Your nurse?” She gasps with mock-realization. “Or is she going to be my new <em>mom</em>?”</p><p>He wonders what kind of reaction she’s trying to get out of him. “You do realize I’ve killed people for less than what you’ve said in this conversation alone.”</p><p>She spins the chair around and crosses her arms over her chest. “Just admit that if I left here for good, you’d miss me.”</p><p>This conversation is going nowhere. Boba turns and leaves.</p><p>“Admit it!” she calls after him. “Just admit it!”</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Later Boba finds Ailyn on the roof of the palace, macrobinoculars pressed her face, inspecting the view from every angle. He notices her checking the rocky ledges nearby, probably wondering if the entrance has any vulnerability to sniper fire. Of course it doesn’t.</p><p>“Word is Han Solo has a kid now!” she calls down to him, like this is a normal way to start a conversation.</p><p>“I was not aware,” he says.</p><p>She lowers the binoculars, and crouches on the roof. “How does this work, culturally? Do I take up your feud with Han Solo himself, or do I have to wait until his four-year-old grows up to be formidable, and then the two of us continue your vendetta by proxy?”</p><p>He doesn’t have the energy to deal with her teasing him. “Not now, Ail’ika.”</p><p>She doesn’t let up. “I’m genuinely asking.”</p><p>“Leave Solo and his kin alone. He was a job, not a personal enemy. Any hostility I felt toward him has faded.”</p><p>She clucks her tongue. “So you’re saying that if I happen upon Han Solo, somewhere in the galaxy, and I have an opening, you don’t want me to do a single thing to him?”</p><p>He considers.</p><p>She raises her eyebrows pointedly.</p><p>“Just a flesh wound,” he tells her. “Nothing fatal. And don’t let him know it’s you.”</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Eventually Boba decides to be direct. He approaches Ailyn when she’s on her favorite couch, cleaning a serrated combat knife with a rag. “Why do you insist on staying here?” he asks her.</p><p>“This is the first time you’ve had anything resembling a house since I was 16,” she says. When Sintas was killed on a job. When Ailyn decided she was old enough to find her own way in the universe. When Boba lost any reason to stay anchored to any place, or any people. “I’m curious to see how long this phase lasts.” The look in her eyes is serious now. “You’ll have a big target on your back, old man. Bigger than when you were taking jobs from Darth Vader.”</p><p>“You don’t need to tell me that, Ailyn.”</p><p>“Do I?” She clears her throat. “I worry about you! Fine! Is that so wrong?” She slams her knife and bloody rag down, looking up at him like she expects an answer.</p><p>“I don’t need you to worry.”</p><p>“Yeah, that doesn’t really factor into it.” She glares at him. Her jaw is set. She refuses to break eye contact.</p><p>He sits next to her. She picks up her knife again like she’s going to get back to work, then puts it aside. She leans against his shoulder, apparently not caring when her head knocks gently against his pauldron. He remembers her clinging to his armored leg when she was little, and how she would try to climb on his shoulders even when he was wearing his cape and jetpack. He remembers doing the same with his own father.</p><p><em>I love you, kid. I’ve missed you.</em> They’re phrases life beat out of him a long time ago. It’s like grasping for words in a language he half-speaks. He has to communicate somehow. He shrugs his arm around Ailyn, and tries to think of something to say.</p><p>“A bunch of Gamorrean assassins are waiting outside to ambush you,” Ailyn says.</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“I already cut their throats.”</p><p>“Good girl.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This was based off a series of semi-shitposts that you can find on my blog at: https://w-k-smith.tumblr.com/tagged/Ailyn-Vel</p><p>Thanks for reading!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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